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Industry: Legal & Law Firms

AI agents for law firms & in-house legal teams

Agents that watch cause lists, draft engagement letters, chase WIP, review contract redlines, and file status updates to clients. Every action is drafted by AI and approved by a lawyer. Built on the same RAG stack we ship with VakeelSaathi.

60-80%
Research time saved
3-5x
Document review throughput
Zero
Missed hearing SLA
BCI
Ethics compliant
The Real Bottleneck

Your associates are running a call centre, not practising law.

Every partner we speak with tells the same story. Juniors spend the first four hours of the day on cause list checks, diary updates, chasing signatures on engagement letters, and typing status emails to anxious clients. The billable work starts after lunch. WIP leaks because nobody has time to draft the invoice narrative. Hearings get missed because a High Court cause list updated at 11pm and nobody checked.

Agents fix this differently from chatbots. A chatbot answers when asked. An agent watches, decides, drafts, and puts the draft in front of a human. The lawyer approves or edits and hits send. The repetitive middle disappears.

For most Tier 1 and Tier 2 firms we speak with, the numbers land in the same place. Roughly 30 percent of associate hours go to research and drafting that a modern agent can accelerate. Another 20 percent goes to matter administration, diary work, WIP chasing, and client status updates that an agent can outright own with a lawyer approving the outputs. That is half of a junior's week returned to substantive practice, without hiring another associate.

Proof of work

Built on VakeelSaathi and ecourt, live in production

VakeelSaathi is our own legal RAG platform serving practising advocates every day. ecourt is our case management system with court diary integration. When we deploy agents for your firm, the retrieval, citation, and eCourts plumbing is already battle-tested. We are not learning legal tech on your budget.

Read the VakeelSaathi engineering deep-dive
How We Build

Agents that plug into the tools your firm already uses

No rip-and-replace. Agents live on top of your existing LMS, calendars, and research platforms.

A typical build integrates with a mix of Indian and global systems. Case data comes from eCourts and your LMS. Research runs through Manupatra, SCC Online, and Indian Kanoon. Calendars, documents, and email sit in MS 365 or Google Workspace. Client communication goes through WhatsApp Business or your existing helpdesk. Billing lives in Tally or your practice-management module. The agent orchestration binds these together and keeps a full audit trail of every read, decision, and drafted output.

We treat integration as first-class work, not glue code. That is why our builds hold up in production. Where a vendor API exists we use it. Where it does not, we build hardened scrapers with change detection, retry logic, and alerts on schema drift. If eCourts changes a page layout, the agent notices before the associate does and we ship a fix inside the managed operations retainer.

eCourts Manupatra SCC Online Indian Kanoon LegalDesk CaseFox MS 365 Google Workspace WhatsApp Business Tally DocuSign ecourt CMS
Agents We Have Built or Scoped

Eight agent patterns for legal teams

Most firms start with one agent, prove ROI in a quarter, then add the next.

Case Intake Agent

Client fills a WhatsApp or web form. Agent collects the facts, prompts for supporting documents, runs a conflict check across your matter database, and drafts the engagement letter for partner review.

80% intake self-serve

Court Diary Agent

Watches eCourts, High Court cause lists, and LiveLaw daily. Detects rescheduled hearings, next-date orders, and new listings. Alerts the responsible lawyer and syncs to team calendars automatically.

Zero missed hearing SLA

Document Review Agent

Reads MSAs, NDAs, shareholder agreements. Flags deviations from the firm's standard playbook. Drafts redlines with a rationale grounded in prior firm precedents.

3-5x faster first-pass review

Legal Research Agent

Given a query, pulls precedents from Manupatra, SCC, and Indian Kanoon. Distinguishes binding from persuasive. Drafts a research memo with paragraph-level citations for the associate to verify.

60-80% research time saved

Billing & Timekeeping Agent

Reads the lawyer's calendar and email, drafts daily time entries with matter narratives, and chases open WIP weekly. Partner reviews and posts. WIP leakage drops sharply.

15-25% WIP recovery

Client Update Agent

Drafts weekly or event-triggered status emails to clients using data from ecourt and your LMS. Partner reads, edits, sends. Clients stop calling for updates because they already have them.

70% drop in status-check calls

Compliance Calendar Agent

For corporate clients, tracks board meeting dates, ROC filings, GST and TDS deadlines, and secretarial obligations. Sends reminders to the client and your compliance team.

Turns compliance into a recurring service line

Contract Lifecycle Agent

Watches every executed contract in your CLM for renewal windows, notice periods, obligation triggers, and change-of-control clauses. Alerts the relationship partner well before the deadline.

No more surprise auto-renewals

Want to see which agent fits your firm first?

15-minute call. You tell us your practice mix, LMS, and biggest operational leak. We come back with a working pilot scope and a fixed price within 48 hours.

Book Free 15-min Call
The Stack Under The Hood

What we ship, and why we chose it

Orchestration

LangGraph for stateful multi-step agents where the flow matters. CrewAI for role-based multi-agent tasks. Both give us the human-in-the-loop primitives that legal work demands.

Models

Claude Sonnet for reasoning and drafting. GPT-4 class as fallback. Self-hosted Llama 3 or Mistral for firms with strict data policies. Model choice is per-agent, not global.

Retrieval & Data

VakeelSaathi's RAG layer with 50,000+ indexed judgments plus your firm's precedents. eCourts scrapers with change detection. ecourt case management APIs for matter data.

Reference Build

VakeelSaathi is where we prove the pattern.

VakeelSaathi is Decipher's own legal AI platform. It runs research, drafting, and court diary workflows for practising advocates across India. Every agent pattern on this page has been production tested there before we bring it to a client firm.

Defensible numbers from live use. Research agents cut standard research time by 60 to 80 percent. Document review throughput lifts 3 to 5x on first pass. The court diary agent has held a zero missed hearing SLA since deployment. We report the misses too. Nothing is hidden behind marketing.

See VakeelSaathi in action
Production metrics
Research time saved
60-80%
Document review throughput
3-5x
Missed hearing SLA
Zero
Hallucination rate
< 1%
Judgments indexed
50,000+
Guardrails

How we keep AI on the right side of professional ethics

Human approval on every action

Agents never auto-file, auto-send, or auto-commit. Every outbound email, filing, engagement letter, or client message sits in a queue for a lawyer to approve, edit, or reject. The agent handles the drafting. The professional judgment stays with the professional.

Citations for every legal claim

Research outputs cite specific paragraphs of specific judgments. Every citation resolves to a link an associate can verify in one click. Confidence thresholds trigger an explicit 'insufficient basis' response instead of a plausible guess. No made-up case names.

BCI & DPDP compliant by design

Public-facing agents reviewed against Bar Council of India Rule 36 and the Standards of Professional Conduct. Data workflows built to DPDP Act obligations with purpose limits, retention windows, and Indian data residency by default.

Process & Pricing

Fixed price per phase. Start with one agent.

Week 1
Discovery

We map your practice mix, current LMS, workflow leaks, and data sensitivity. Written feasibility doc with a recommended first agent.

Free
Weeks 2-4
Agent Pilot

One agent, one workflow, live in production. Usually the court diary agent or intake agent. Partners see it working on real matters.

₹1.5-3 L
Weeks 4-12
Multi-Agent Build

3 to 5 agents wired into your LMS, calendars, eCourts, and research platforms. SSO, audit logs, DPDP-compliant deployment, partner dashboard.

₹5-15 L
Ongoing
Managed Ops

eCourts scraper upkeep, model API costs, weekly evals, prompt tuning, security patching, human-in-the-loop reviews.

From ₹40k/mo

Solo advocates and boutique firms who do not need a custom build can start on VakeelSaathi's per-lawyer SaaS tier. Same core capability, shared infrastructure, no upfront project cost.

See VakeelSaathi SaaS pricing
FAQ

What partners and GCs ask on every call

Yes, when the architecture is right. We run agent workloads inside your VPC or on-prem, keep vector stores in Indian data centres (AWS Mumbai, Azure India), sign zero-data-retention terms with OpenAI and Anthropic, and offer self-hosted open models like Llama or Mistral where nothing leaves your infrastructure. Privilege markers travel with every document so agents never expose privileged material in outbound drafts.

Yes. Data fiduciary obligations sit with the firm, so we build purpose-limited processing, consent capture at intake, retention windows, and subject-rights response workflows into the agents. Cross-border transfer is off by default. We provide a DPDP compliance memo tied to your specific deployment.

No. Client-facing agents are framed as firm workflow tools, not solicitation. Intake bots are triggered only by inbound enquiries the firm already receives. Public marketing copy is reviewed against BCI Rule 36 and the Chapter II Standards of Professional Conduct. We give partners a compliance checklist before go-live.

Yes. For Tier 1 firms and PSU counsel we deploy the full stack on-prem. LangGraph orchestrator, self-hosted LLM (Llama 3, Mistral, or Qwen), local vector store, and audit logs on your servers. No client data ever touches the public internet.

Yes. We integrate through documented APIs where they exist, and through hardened scrapers or agent-driven RPA where they do not. Common integrations include LegalDesk, CaseFox, Manupatra, SCC Online, Indian Kanoon, eCourts, MS 365, Google Workspace, Tally, and WhatsApp Business. If you use something bespoke, we scope it in discovery.

Pilot with one agent runs ₹1.5 to ₹3 lakh over 3-4 weeks. A multi-agent build wired into your LMS, calendars, and eCourts runs ₹5 to ₹15 lakh over 8-12 weeks. Managed operations start at ₹40,000 per month. Smaller firms can start on VakeelSaathi's per-lawyer SaaS tier without a custom build.

Default is Claude Sonnet for reasoning and drafting, with GPT-4 class models as fallback. For pure retrieval and classification we use smaller open models to control cost. Firms with strict data policies can run self-hosted Llama or Mistral. Model choice is a per-agent decision, not a lock-in.

Three defences. First, every research answer flows through the VakeelSaathi RAG layer where citations resolve to real judgment paragraphs. Second, drafts never auto-send. A human lawyer approves every outbound email, filing, or client message. Third, confidence thresholds trigger an explicit 'insufficient basis' response instead of a guess. We publish per-agent accuracy from live evals.
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Related capabilities & proof

Ready to let your associates practise law again?

Book a 15-minute call. Tell us your practice mix and biggest operational leak. We come back with a working pilot scope and a fixed price within 48 hours.

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